Indiana University psychologists have shown that a baby's most likely first words are based upon their visual experience, laying the foundation for a new theory of infant language learning. The study appears in the journal of the Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B.

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Families with a loved one on the autism spectrum now have an opportunity to participate in a landmark study researching the genetics of autism. The national study is the largest autism research project to date.

Aer Lingus and the Kinney Center for Autism Education and Support at Saint Joseph’s University have partnered to develop a visual guide that helps individuals with autism and related disorders prepare for and experience air travel.

Matthew Colonnese, Ph.D., assistant professor of pharmacology and physiology at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, published a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience establishing a mouse model for human fetal electrographic development.

The human eye often falls short in the hunt for faint genetic drivers that raise the risk of devastating neurological diseases such as autism and schizophrenia. But little eludes a microscope optic attached to a computer, and algorythms that can relate previously hidden phenotypes to subtle genetic mutations. The computational screening developed by Georgia Tech researchers has the potential to reveal webs of genetic dangers that produce disease risk by compounding tiny traits that, when take alone, may appear trivial and harmless.

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For most of his life, Kevin Hughes has felt like an outsider. A loner as a child, the 65-year-old comedian struggled socially as a teenager and lacked friends as an adult, often offending people without knowing why. That changed one night when a physician told him he had autism after one of his comedy shows sending him on a painful three-year journey of self-diagnosis experienced by millions of Americans with ASD

A subtle change occurred in our evolutionary history 100,000 years ago which allowed people who thought and behaved differently - such as individuals with autism - to be integrated into society, academics from the University of York have concluded.

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Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered that mutations in PTEN affect the assembly of connections between two brain areas important for the processing of social cues: the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with complex cognitive processes such as moderating social behavior, and the amygdala, which plays a role in emotional processing.

Early detection of autism can dramatically improve the benefits of treatment, but often the disability is not suspected until a child enters school. A new smartphone app being developed by a University at Buffalo undergraduate and her advisor could change that by giving parents a reliable, easy-to-use tool for at home use to determine if there is a need for clinical examination.

An Indiana University physicist and neuroscientist who studies how physical movement can be used to detect autism in children and adults has received support from the National Science Foundation. The $750,000 NSF grant to IU scientist Jorge V. José and collaborators will be used to apply analytical methods pioneered at IU and Rutgers University toward diagnosing, and possibly treating, a wider range of learning disabilities.

Pediatric researchers report that children with ASD may mistakenly be diagnosed with ADHD because they have autism-related social impairments rather than problems with attention. This is important for understanding what are the right services and treatments for a child.

Scientists, led by a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, have linked mutations in a single gene to autism in people who have a rare tumor syndrome typically diagnosed in childhood. The findings, in patients with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), may lead to a better understanding of the genetic roots of autism in the wider population.

New research led by UC San Francisco scientists has revealed that mutations in a gene linked with brain development may dispose people to multiple forms of psychiatric disease by changing the way brain cells communicate.

A fully-automated rat maze built by Technion researchers could help scientists better understand how individuals cooperate, and how this process may go awry in the brains of people with disorders ranging from autism to schizophrenia.